Moses Herzog, a fifty-year-old professor of history and literature, wrote letters, wrote decisively to everyone in the world - people personally familiar and unfamiliar, living and dead, relatives of former and present, thinkers and presidents, publishers and brothers in the workshop, church figures and so on, specifically, that happened to himself or to the Lord God. Spinoza, Eisenhower, Nietzsche, Rozanov, Heidegger were among his addressees among widely known personalities ... Moreover, on one piece of paper there was a place and a polemic with Herr Nietzsche about the nature of the Dionysian beginning, and gentle words addressed to the girlfriend left and addressed to the President Panama's advice is to combat the dominance of rats in the country using contraceptives.
Others explained the Duke's oddity by the fact that antiquity, apparently, had moved with reason, and were wrong. It was simply that the second divorce cost him too much: both the fact itself and the completely disgusting circumstances surrounding it completely knocked the Duke’s ground from under his feet. This soil is the same - as he understood it, with sound sense, and the time for sound thinking, as well as the corresponding mood, suddenly appeared when the usual course of family-academic existence was interrupted - and was already unshakable for a long time: the sixth was exchanged; two at first happy, but broken up marriages - each with a child; some other women, like wives, who have appropriated for themselves not the worst particles of his soul; friends, with rare exceptions, turned out to be either traitors or boring cretins; the academic career that had begun brilliantly — Moses Herzog’s dissertation “Romanticism and Christianity” was translated into a number of languages — but gradually faded away under a pile of written paper, which was never destined to turn into a book that provides answers to the most pressing questions for Westerners.
Perhaps the Duke wrote his letters precisely with the aim of once again getting on a little more solid ground - they served him as if by strings, stretched in all possible directions to different eras, ideas, social institutions, people ... By their tension, these strings are more or less recorded, determined the position of the Duke in the universe, affirmed him, Moses Duke, a person in the face of unbridled entropy, encroaching in our century on the spiritual, emotional, intellectual, family, professional and sexual life of a human individual,
Perhaps, however, all this seemed to him only.
It did not seem, but clearly passed before the Duke's mental gaze, composing in memory from isolated episodes and flowing plots into one another, the eventual, factual side of his life. Unlike our hero, we will try to restore the cause-effect relationships and the time sequence, we will start with the background.
Moses' father, Iona Isakovich Herzog, lived in St. Petersburg on forged documents of a merchant of the first guild, flooding the Russian market with onions from Egypt. He flourished until the police brought him to clean water just before the war; however, Papa Herzog did not wait for the process and with his family he hastily moved to Canada, where the well-being of the Dukes came to an end. Jonah tried himself in a wide variety of activities, from farming to bootlegging, but fatal bad luck chased him everywhere. But it was necessary to feed the family, pay for housing, bring four children into the people - Moses, two of his brothers and a sister. Only at the end of Jonah's life did the Duke somehow get on his feet and settled in Chicago.
From the world of beggars, mainly Jewish quarters, where Yiddish was heard much more often than English, Moses made his way to the university. Upon graduation, he was reputed - yes, in fact, he was - a promising young specialist. Soon he married Daisy, who bore him a son, Marco. Locked up for the winter with a young wife in the wilderness. The duke finished his work “Romanticism and Christianity”, which caused almost a sensation in the scientific community.
But then Daisy somehow went wrong, they parted, and the Duke began to wander weekly from Philadelphia, where he read his course, to New York to see his son. In Philadelphia, meanwhile, in his life, the touching, undemanding, tender and rather funny Japanese Sono formed, and a little later - Madeleine.
Madeline, with her eloquent surname Pontritter, was then a zealous Catholic convert and specialist in the history of Russian religious thought. Almost from the very beginning, she had arranged tearful scenes in his bed right on the bed about the fact that she had been a Christian for weeks, but because of him she could no longer go to confession. The duke loved Madeleine, and therefore, overcoming inhuman difficulties, he obtained a divorce from Daisy in order to marry her; Sono told him that Madeline had evil, cold eyes, but the Duke then wrote her words to jealousy.
Madeleine's religious fervor soon somehow vanished; she never baptized June. The duke, succumbing to the temptation of patriarchy, committed an act of which he later regretted more than once: he killed the whole of his father’s inheritance, twenty thousand, for the purchase and home improvement in a town in western Massachusetts, not even indicated on the state map. The Ludeville dwelling was to become the family nest of the Dukes (this phrase was very amusing to Moses), here he planned to complete his book.
The year spent by the Duke and Madeleine in the village house was marked by his purposeful work on the improvement of the home and on the book, their general love of enthusiasm, but also the tantrums and bouts of malevolence Madeline, which she explained - when she considered it necessary to do this - a shame on what by the grace of the Duke, she stupidly spends the best years of life in the wilderness; as she once sought into this wilderness, Madeleine seemed to have forgotten.
Over time, Madeleine increasingly began to talk about moving. In the pursuit of large cities, she was supported by Valentine Gersbach, Herzogov’s neighbor, the announcer of the local radio station, constantly repeating that such a brilliant woman and a promising specialist should be surrounded by interesting people who would appreciate her and her talents.
What is true is true. With society in Ludville, it was tight - the circle of communication of the Dukes was limited to Gersbach and his colorless, quiet wife Phoebe. Moses and Madeleine were close friends with them, while Valentine sought to create an image of faithful, ardent friendship; sometimes assuming a patronizing tone in relation to the Duke, he nevertheless slavishly copied everything that seemed to him noble in the Duke.
Madeleine managed to insist on her own, and the Dukes moved to Chicago, taking Phoebe and Valentine with him, to whom Moses, using old connections, found a good place in the city.
When the Duke rented a house, renovated something in it, arranged some other little things, Madeleine suddenly solemnly announced to him that it was all between them, she no longer loved him and therefore he had better go somewhere, for example, to New York leaving joon to her. Knowing that if a woman leaves a man, then this is always final, the Duke did not bicker or ask Madeleine to think again.
Then he was struck by Madeleine's inhuman prudence: he paid the rent far ahead; the lawyer - he generally considered him his friend - ruled out any possibility of taking custody of the Duke of his daughter, and at the same time began to impose insurance, according to which in case of the death or mental illness of the Duke, Madeleine would be provided until the end of days; the doctor, also trained by Madeleine, hinted that something was going wrong with his, Duke, brain.
Completely shattered, the Duke left Chicago and then went to Europe for a long time, where he lectured in different countries, loved some women ... He returned to New York in a worse condition than he left. It was here that he set about writing letters.
In New York, the Duke is somehow swiftly, but seems to have firmly made friends with Ramona, who was listening to his lectures at evening courses. Ramona was the owner of a flower shop and a master's degree from Columbia University in the history of art. The duke was more than pleased with this particular woman, in whose veins an explosive mixture of Argentinean, Jewish, French and Russian blood flowed: in bed she was a professional in the best sense of the word, excellently cooked, her mind and spiritual qualities also made me want nothing more; only one thing was slightly embarrassing - Ramone was about forty, therefore, deep down she would not mind having a husband.
Thanks to Ramona, the ability to take action has returned to the Duke. He went to Chicago.
The duke had previously experienced suspicions - for which he was madly ashamed of himself - about his wife’s connection with Gersbach, but as soon as he made them somehow to make Madeleine, she answered him with murderous arguments like that, they say, how she can sleep with a person from whom, when he uses the toilet, the stink is on the whole house. But now the Duke had a letter from a friend of his closest friend Lucas Asphalter, who moonlighted with Madeleine as a babysitter. It clearly stated that not only did Gersbach almost always live with Madeleine, they once locked baby June in a car so that it would not interfere with them making love. If one could prove that fornication is happening in the house where his child lives, the girl would almost certainly be given to her father. But the only person whose testimony on this score would be incontrovertible, Phoebe stupidly repeated to the Duke that Valentine comes home every night, and hardly communicates with Madeleine.
The duke saw with his own eyes, crept to the house, as Gersbach bathed June. He had with him a revolver, which he took from his father’s table along with a pile of royal rubles intended as a gift to his son - after Chicago, the Duke planned to visit Marko in the summer camp. There were two rounds in the revolver, but the Duke knew that he would not shoot at anyone, and did not.
The next day, after agreeing with Madeleine through Asphalt, the Duke met June and went for a walk with her, to see all sorts of interesting things, a minibus crashed into his car. June was not injured when the police pulled out the unconscious Duke from the cabin, the dead father’s revolver fell out of his pockets, which, of course, did not have permission, and suspicious rubles.
The duke was immediately arrested. The Madeleine, who was summoned to pick up the girl, told the police that the Duke was a dangerous and unpredictable person, and that he carried a loaded gun for a reason.
However, everything worked out: the rich brother of the Duke of Schur made a pledge, and he went to Ludville to lick his wounds. Another brother, Will, who was involved in real estate trading, visited him there, and together they decided that while the house was not worth selling, they still could not return the money invested in it. The Duke found the house in a terribly neglected state, but until Will arrived, he did not even bother to take care of electricity, since all his time was spent writing letters. The brother persuaded the Duke to engage in basic beautification, and he went to a neighboring village. There, Ramona found him on the phone, visiting nearby friends. They conspired to dine with the Duke.
The upcoming visit of Ramona a little bothered the Duke, but, in the end, they only dine. In anticipation of the guest, the Duke cooled the wine, picked up flowers. Meanwhile, the electricity turned on, a woman from the village continued to sweep sor ...
Suddenly, in between, the Duke wondered if the writing of the letters had exhausted itself. And from that day on, he no longer wrote them. Not a single word.
